Why UC workers are on strike this week

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Alfonso Ramos attends a union protest at UC Irvine Medical Center with his 1-year-old daughter Violette. The cafeteria worker wants good health insurance for his daughter. “Everything I do, I do for her,” he said outside the hospital in Orange on Monday, May 7, 2018. (Photo by Mindy Schauer, Orange County Register/SCNG)

This three-day strike by University of California workers is no doubt disruptive and inconvenient. The same is true of the graduation speakers boycott that will accompany these efforts.

But there is good reason for both.

The more than year-long labor dispute at the heart of these protests is about widening income, racial and gender gaps at UC — and the university’s determination to deepen these disparities, even as it presents itself as a beacon of social mobility and equality to the public at large.

A few weeks ago, new research exposed the depth of the problem and UC’s hypocrisy on it. Black women within our ranks need to work six years on average to reach the starting wage of a white man. African Americans are disappearing from our bargaining unit, and more likely to work for low-wage outsourcing companies.

The distinction here is important. Contract custodians, parking attendants, and registry health care workers are paid only a fraction of the wages of workers doing the same jobs as UC employees. They are often denied access to health benefits, vacation time, or retirement. They face higher risk of wage theft and other workplace abuses — especially since UC doesn’t bother to police its contractors or enforce its own minimum wage. And last year, the California State Auditor confirmed that UC is displacing its own career workers through outsourcing — and often violating its own competitive bidding rules in the process.

While more UC jobs are outsourced, what were once middle class career ladders for women and people of color are vanishing. The deep disparities revealed in the report make the need for real action to combat them all the more urgent.

As California NAACP President Alice Huffman recently commented, “if we think this would be a problem at a private company employing 200 people, it should be a five-alarm fire at a taxpayer-supported public institution that employs nearly 200,000.”

She’s right.

For its part, AFSCME has offered good faith proposals to address the problem — like guaranteed insourcing of long-term contractors, equal pay for equal work, and training funds to help more frontline employees that make an average of $35-$50K per year acquire new skills and build careers of public service at UC.

The university has responded by not only rejecting these efforts, but proposed flat wages, higher healthcare premiums, and cuts to retirement that will only leave these workers further behind. It no doubt uses the proceeds from outsourcing jobs to companies that pay workers less to subsidize raises and golden parachutes for executives, while hiding $175 million slush funds from public view.

And if that weren’t bad enough, UC has now decided to subvert the legally required collective bargaining process altogether — unilaterally imposing contract terms that will only make UC’s inequality problem worse.

In the end, 97 percent of AFSCME represented workers voted to authorize this month’s strike. We didn’t do it to disrupt the university. We did it because UC is trying to normalize inequality and the displacement of communities of color.

In other words, it’s the outsourcing, stupid.

UC alone can end this dispute by coming to the table prepared to pioneer a better future for the frontline workers who make this institution run — not just its white male elites.

Liz Perlman is the executive director of AFSCME Local 3299 — the University of California’s largest employee union representing over 25,000 frontline Service and Patient Care Technical Workers. Learn more at www.afscme3299.org, and more about the UC strike at https://afscme3299.org/fight-inequality/